A solution for reallocating public bike among bike stations

Abstract

Public bike system for proximity travel is widely used in urban cities all over the world. Main reasons for launching public bike program is to reduce carbon footprint so as to prevent greenhouse effect and to solve Last-Mile problem in order to make convenient for citizens. However, we may encounter awkward cases in peak hours (from 7:00 to 9:00 and 17:00 to 19:00) that no bike is available at some stations or no vacant place is left to put bikes. The actual solution in most cities is in a traditional way based on call centers. A personnel taking charge of bikes in a certain zone reallocates bikes among bike stations based on notification of bike users by telephone call when bike stations are full or empty. This inefficient solution will reduce bike utilization and even annoy bike users. In this paper, we propose a system & methodology to intelligently guide personnel to reallocate bikes among stations, aiming at overcoming the above awkward cases and maximizing bike utilization. © 2012 IEEE.